It’s remarkable, considering how frequently our politicians and cable news commentariat remind us of the “free market” we live in, just how existentially unfree things seem down here where the rubber meets the road. We constantly see the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal order equated to “our free market system.” But as I always understood it, a free market was simply a system of free exchange. Why does this so-called “free market system” seem to require, for its survival, a regime of totalitarian lockdown resembling Verhoeven’s take on “Starship Troopers?”
Never mind stuff like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and the United States government’s perpetual wars to make the world safe for corporate domination. I’m more interested in the forms of authoritarianism we encounter on a daily basis, as a direct adjunct of maintaining what neoliberals consider a “free market” as such: Increasingly draconian restrictions on the most basic rights of free speech, an upward ratcheting of the surveillance state, and all sorts of other authoritarian intrusions we’d normally associate with the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — and all in the name of “our free market system.”
Take, for example, “intellectual property” — a state-granted monopoly central to the corporate neoliberal order, but which has precious little to do with anything remotely resembling an actual free market. Your Internet service provider isn’t a business performing a service for you — the paying customer — so much as an adjunct of the RIAA and MPAA and their lackeys in government. Your ISP spies on you on behalf of Big Content to ensure you’re not downloading any big torrents.
Ever get a threatening phone call from your ISP? You might as well be their employee, rather than the reverse. Ever get a DMCA takedown notice? Ever have a website taken down by your host in response to an unsubstantiated complaint? Welcome to “our free market system.”
Remember the Pinkertons, uniformed private thugs the bosses used to hire to bust union organizers’ heads? Now Monstanto hires them to snoop around private farms, testing farmers’ crops to see if they contain any genetic material from engineered seeds under patent. The Runyons, an Indiana farm family, were invaded in 2008 by Monsanto’s hired goons in response to an “anonymous tip” that their farm hosted Roundup-ready soybeans. Sounds almost like — ahem — the Drug War, doesn’t it?
Never mind that the Runyons never planted Monsanto’s seed. Never mind that their crops were contaminated — very much against their will — by GMO pollen blowing over from a neighbor’s farm. You might think it was the Runyons who had a cause of action for the contamination of their crops with frankenfood DNA. But not in our so-called “free market system.” In this thing the neoliberals call a “free market,” being contaminated by Monsanto DNA — even against your will — is prima facie evidence of “piracy.” You’re guilty until proven innocent.
Orwell once observed that after 1914, the states of the 20th century were resurrecting forms of torture and atrocity largely unseen since the Inquisition. Likewise, under “our free market system,” we’re seeing a resurgence of — believe it or not — debtors’ prison. In the “old days” — as recently as the 1990s — creditors would attempt to collect debts in-house, then write them off. Now collection agencies buy up debt for pennies on the dollar. After serving process at an address where you lived three moves ago, they get you declared in contempt in absentia and jailed. Or you might just find your bank account cleaned out by your bank in collusion with the creditors, without warning.
And then there are “food libel laws” and FDA restrictions on commercial speech. If you label your milk rBGH-free, you can expect to be muscled by Monsanto’s lawyers. The very act of informing your customers your milk lacks rBGH constitutes disparagement of the frankenmilk from those factory dairies, you see. If you advertise that you inspect your meat for Mad Cow Disease more frequently than the USDA requires, you’re disparaging your competitors by implying that simply meeting the regulatory standard — a standard based on SOUND SCIENCE! — is somehow inadequate. And someone’s feelings might get hurt.
Never mind all the rhetoric you hear about “our free market system” on CNBC or read on the WSJ editorial page. If it requires the kind of statist authoritarianism we used to associate with the Soviet Union, it’s not a free market.
Citations to this article:
- E.D. Kain, SOPA, the NDAA, and Patent-Trolling: Why Americans Need a Civil Liberties Caucus, Forbes, 12/10/11
- E.D. Kain, The Problem with Patents, Forbes, 06/15/11
- Kevin Carson, If This is the Free Market, Why Do I Feel So Unfree?, Carroll County, Maryland Standard, 06/07/11
"You’re innocent until proven guilty."
I think you meant guilty until proven innocent?
Dammit, yes! Thanks.
My recent post Open Source Government
A nation with intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.) is superior to one without these protections. Why should someone write a brilliant book or develop new kinds of life-saving medicines if they are not to profit from their creativity? What motivates them? The good of others? Absurd! I'll take a stateless nation, but not if I have to personally hunt down everyone who's reprinting my novel without my permission.
I don't think any intelligent person is laboring under the delusion that the USA has a free market. But it is not Monsanto's fault, or the fault of any one person or corporation that things have gotten so corrupt. Monsanto's ability to abuse people does not derive from some secret power they have, the people of this nation have consented to be abused. This consent takes shape in part by sending politicians to congress who have no morals, no ethics, and no shame. If the people took responsibility for securing their own rights, they would elect representatives who could not be bought and sold like prostitutes.
Speaking of "food safety" and milk products, there's an interesting story in the economist about a Californian entrepreneur who was forbidden from selling yogurt because it was prepared in a manner that had been proven safe over the course of decades, but was unknown to California regulators.
http://www.economist.com/node/18712862
"The regulator demanded instead that Ms Dashtaki set up a “Grade A” dairy plant, just as a large factory processing raw milk would be required to do. She was told to install, among other things, a “pasteuriser with a recorder”, a “culture tank”, and a “filler”, which apparently also required a “mechanical capper” to screw lids on jars. "
Thank you, Kevin, for keeping the message out there. As the corporate state tightens its chokehold on us, the truth is sinking in, slowly but surely. I am noticing on some left-leaning blogs (at least in the comments), a growing disdain for the state and a dawning realization of the consequences of concentrated coercive power. BHO's presidency has thrown a huge bucket of cold water in the face of many liberals…hopefully a few more are waking up to some alternative views.
btw – I just finished " Toward a Truly Free Market," by the distributist author, John Médaille. Many of your themes resonate in the work, and Mr. Médaille quoted you several times. Way to go!
My recent post uPLANu NEWS!
Talking about someone’s feelings getting hurt, here’s a story (http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04-02/health/pfizer.bextra_1_bextra-pfizer-and-pharmacia-generic-drugs?_s=PM:HEALTH) about the FDA not wanting to hurt the feelings of Pfizer, or strike that, maybe it’s the feelings of patients that got sold a dangerous drug, oh no, maybe it’s the innocent employees of Pfizer, or is it the patients who will be deprived of Pfizer drugs to be reimbursed by Medicare for the benefit of … the executives and stockholders of Pfizer? I don’t know. Maybe if I could set up a four level corporate shell company to take the blame for something, maybe all would be much clearer. Free market? I guess some of us are more equal than others.
Don't forget the abusive behaviour documented time and again, of HOAs and local governments, across the length and breadth of the USA.
Of course we aren't immune here in the UK. We have cases of local government using covert surveillance powers supposedly targeted at terrorism to monitor alleged housing benefit 'cheats'. We have local government refusing to collect wheeled rubbish bins from the kerb side because they are 'too heavy', or because the lid is open by 1/2".
Reblogged here: http://www.withoutthestate.com/panchromatica/2011…
This post really made me think about the flaws in the neoliberal conception of freedom and how it is obvious that corporate freedom is restricting civil freedom.
I think we have to look at contemporary society like Max Weber as a struggle for wealth, status and power, but also that freedom is distributed along with this categories. We need to see for what it is, a hierarchical society in which the rich and powerful experience a larger share of freedom than the poor and less influential. And also that their freedom restrict our freedom.
I think the monetary system itself works as a good example. Your freedom of choice and number of options at every given moment will rise along with the size of your wallet. Capitalism expansion works the other way around but towards the same goal, that is to transform everything in society into a market where your access to quantity and quality of every resource or service depends on your economic capital.
I therefore believe income inequality to be the biggest threat to personal freedom in a society. The second biggest is the weakening of social mobility which consolidate class inequalities.
Im not sure that a stateless society is the answer thought. The state is a complex institution and how it acts is dependent on power relations in every given society. My personal belief is that it's possible for a civil society to use the state to counteract corporate power and work for equality.
And yet PolitiFact, usually a good watchdog site, just gave Mitt Romney a "pants on fire" rating for saying that "We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy":
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/20…
My recent post Our Revolt Is Not Obamas
Kevin, your remarks on debt collection are more perceptive than you may realize. I happen to be a cubicle drone at one of these collection agencies, I can tell you that much of the debt (I "collected" for a major telecommunications firm in Canada, now General Electric) is "outsourced" long before it is sold off. Licensing of collectors (the cost of which the employees must often pay directly) restricts debt collection to a handful of large firms; many small firms cannot legally collect their own debts and *have to* forward it to one of the big ones.
And what's more, one of our biggest clients is..you guessed it, the federal and provincial government., collecting for everything from "unpaid student loans" to provincial offense fines (smuggling untaxed cigarettes and other "traffic violations") Just a few seats behind me I regularly hear people being threatened with arrest warrants, which collection agencies can now request from a justice of the peace.
Kevin, your remarks on debt collection are more perceptive than you may realize. I happen to be a cubicle drone at one of these collection agencies, I can tell you that much of the debt (I “collected” for a major telecommunications firm in Canada, now General Electric) is “outsourced” long before it is sold off. Licensing of collectors (the cost of which the employees must often pay directly) restricts debt collection to a handful of large firms; many small firms cannot legally collect their own debts and *have to* forward it to one of the big ones.
And what’s more, one of our biggest clients is..you guessed it, the federal and provincial government., collecting for everything from “unpaid student loans” to provincial offense fines (smuggling untaxed cigarettes and other “traffic violations”) Just a few seats behind me I regularly hear people being threatened with arrest warrants, which collection agencies can now request from a justice of the peace.
The free market economy is the worst system in the world. Except for all the others.
Intellectual Property laws aren't great. But without them, we'd look like China. Is that a system the author is suggesting we emulate? DMCA takedown notices? Just what action should someone be able to take to remove infringing material?
Bottom line. Should a person, group, or even *gasp* a corporation, have the right to use their own property as they see fit? Or is that an example of this awful unfree market we all labor under?
I don’t feel particularly “unfree” and in my experience neither does the vast majority of the Western world. I can travel between countries relatively easily. I can start a business with little hassle. I can very easily get a job. I can download music and movies easily just like everyone else. I can say prettymuch whatever I want with negligible risk of imprisonment or persecution. I can go see good movies with friends, read any book or buy any films I want cheaply on the internet, rent a flat in a nice apartment easily, go to a huge range of diverse restaurants and clubs all the time. I have zero chance of starving. I was arrested for having a lot of pot when I was younger – I got fined 500 bucks. Sucked, but not that big a deal. etc.
Most today have comparatively very comfortable and free everyday lives.
The few people who justifiably feel significantly “unfree” in Western states seem to be those who are personally the subjects of significant, direct, explicit and drastic aggression from the State – like the examples in the post above… but that is fortunately relatively very rare in contemporary capitalist nation-states. Otherwise few people do, or are going to, sympathize with sensationalistic complaints from leftist/anarchist ideologues about ‘the totalitarian oppression of modern corporate suburbia’ or whatever because they come across as spoiled whiners making much ado about nothing.
Putting forward how freer markets and more libertarian governance can work and make life even better in so many ways seems effective, and it’s what got me on board with libertarianism and anti-statism. Pointing out the unnecessary inconveniences and inefficiencies of modern nation-statism is part of that… which includes pointing out that empirically we don’t have 100% free markets in the US. However, putting forward melodramatic outrage doesn’t seem effective, and it’s what gave me a very negative impression of radical leftists/anarchists when I was an average apolitical college student. Seems counterproductive.
Why are you assuming the only existing theories of ownership all reduce to your particular interpretation of what is and isn't property? You are by virtue of this act discarding all relevant and working theories of ownership that differ from yours, declaring without actually explaining that all other theories are horseshit and you have it right.
What an arrogant, presumptive and intellectually sabotaging point of view you have.
I almost expected you to follow up that ignorant screed with "White Power", but I guess you would have titled your hand just a bit too much, right? Things certainly DO look rosy– when you are a white, middle-class male who has been receiving end of privilege for the past, oh…. millennium. However, if you exist outside of this culture of whiteness and you opt to live in a way that does not submit to this culture of white supremacy, you are –as they say– fucked.
I mean, of course YOU are not outraged– YOU have never been arrested for being black on a Friday night, YOU have never been detained and questioned by police because your accent and struggle to use a foreign language indicated that you are a "them" and not a "us", YOU have never had the fear of being raped by your captors, YOU have never had your land literally robbed from beneath you and been forced into a living situation where conditions are almost impossible to improve unless you can be one of the lucky few to bend the ear of the State in your direction, YOU don't work a job that you must take (or risk starving) because all alternatives possible have been eliminated and you have virtually no bargaining power. None of these things are "rare" by any rational standard– they happen every day, and in obscene numbers. It is only from the privileged context of some whitebread apologist for the existing social order that you can look around and say "we don't have it so bad, and you're just coming off as whiners".
Thinking on it though, you're right in a way, that "few people…are going to… sympathize with sensationalistic complaints", because most white people enjoy a vast amount of privilege, despite what their class placement may be. They probably WILL defend the existing order, but only because it allows them to live within a certain whiteness comfort zone and not out of any die-hard allegiance to the existing order. Those who exist outside of this culture of whiteness are invariably those who DO feel the brunt of existing order– the indigenous, the oppressed minorities, etc. Ignoring the effects of neo-colonialism on the existing order when making an analysis of the existing culture is cutting out one of your historically based legs form beneath yourself.